Sleepwalk - A Selection By Optimo (Espacio)

Sorry for my lazy reviews lately but I am doing this from work and besides, sometimes I really don't know what to say; especially in this case!

So yeah, drink a bottle Robetussin and enjoy this one...

Pitchfork says:

Until now, Optimo's mixes have retained at least tenuous footing on the dance floor over which the two DJs have presided, every Sunday night, since 1997, Sleepwalk-- the followup to 2007's Walkabout-- is a fever dream of ambient muckracking and fucked-up balladeering. "Beats," in the debased vernacular of dance music, are few and far between; that the most uptempo cut here comes courtesy Mulatu Astatke, best known from the Ethiopiques series (and prime placement in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers) should say something about the mix's profoundly narcotic vibe. This is head music, "listening" music, something like an alternate history of easy listening played out in uneasy selections from the likes of Nurse With Wound, Cluster, Coil, and, of course, those avant-garde stalwarts, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. There are moments that sound like background oceanscapes for run-down spas (SPOILER ALERT: they're Chris Watson, the Touch/BBC field recording artist, and former member of Cabaret Voltaire) and there are moments that sound like Rod McKuen over Wendy Carlos. Throughout, across tempos that range from the soporific to an easygoing Codeine andante, the melodic line sticks to a wormy sort of furrow, with dated synthesizers morphing into flutes, into voice, into trombones, into guitars flying 80s telltale delay, into fiddle, into still more dated synthesizers. In love with the midrange, the mix follows a line as unstably sure as the median strip on a particularly lysergic midnight drive. And having said all this, I'm actually loathe to explain any more about Sleepwalk. In fact, I'd like to propose an experiment. Buy the CD, if possible, and do what you can to avert your gaze from the tracklisting. If your habit is to immediately rip CDs into your computer, don't copy the artists or track titles. And then just live with the thing for a while. I had the good fortune to receive my review copy as a single, 73-minute MP3 with no identifying information attached, and the sheer experience of the thing, as hypnagogic as its title promised, was visceral and overwhelming, even in partial doses. Later come the reflective, intellectual surprises: this 80s throwback revealing themselves as secretive experimentalists, that Krautrock staple surely referencing magic mushrooms in their track title, and a particular (there could only be one) avant-disco figurehead dropping down in a shining beam of cello and trombone (ok, so I've given that one away-- it's Arthur Russell) at his most otherworldly and eternal and perfect. There will be plenty of time to go back and pore over the tracklisting, Google the things you don't know, find connections cleverer than any I've made here. But all of that pales in comparison with listening to the thing and losing yourself in its invented universe. This is the Make Believe Ballroom at its most credible and all-encompassing. It's an illusion you don't ever want to end.
— Philip Sherburne, January 29, 2009

Download:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ymqtmzz2dr4